“Yeah, okay.” Grant said. “What’s it mean?”
“Indicates possibly high degree of calcium is present.”
Jack stood opposite me, leaning casually against the wall, like someone waiting for a cab. Grant, meanwhile, hung over my left shoulder. His large body generated heat in an already-warm room. And I knew he felt that heat because every few minutes, he pulled a handkerchief from his front pocket and dabbed his forehead.
None of us asked to open the conference room door.
I parted the stack of bills.
“Careful,” Grant said.
Without raising my head, I glanced at Jack. Now his expression was totally readable. Do not mess with Grant.
“Thank you,” I said in my best Southern accent, placing the rubber band on a fresh glass slide. I looked through the scope’s lens. “Parched surface, cracks in the rubber.”
“And,” Grant said. “It means…?”
“It means I’m trying to make this fast. The rubber’s decay might be a quicker way of assessing how long these bills were buried, instead of going through the decay of all the individual dollar—”
Grant leaned closer, his enormous body blocking the fluorescent lights overhead. “Let me look.”
Another glance at Jack. Harmon…
I pushed back my chair. “Let me give you some room.”
Grant bent down to the scope, peering into the lens. When he started fiddling with the focus knobs—badly—I didn’t help. “How long do you think?” he asked.
“How long has the money been buried?”
He looked up with beady eyes. “No, how long before lunch.”
Using every ounce of self-control, I rolled out the granddaddy of my peacemaking tools—the polite smile. “I wouldn’t want to say my guess is certain, but because of the presence of calcium in the soil, which you saw in the bubbl—”
“Yeah.” He rolled his hands, telling me to speed up. “The dirt bubbled.”
“Which means the soil is alkaline. Not highly acidic. Ph levels influence decay rates. More acid means more decay.”
“So, how long?”
“Right now my guess is about weeks and months. Not years. The rubber band is intact, still has some elasticity, and the bills are in pretty good shape, considering.” I gritted my teeth into the second polite smile. “Should I continue?”
“That’s what we’re here for.”
Grant stepped back from the scope. I reached into my pack and found the Ziploc baggie holding my soil sample from the Willapa riverbank. I’d taken it that morning with Lani, knowing somebody would need it. As I stared at another exam slide, Grant asked what the “dirt” was. I told him.
He smirked. “Why didn’t you turn that dirt over to the FBI?”
I hesitated. He had a point. It was an oversight on my part. Back then, I suspected the bills were part of a bank robbery, not the Case of the Century for the Seattle field office.
“Well?” Grant demanded.
“Harmon offered me the soil.” Jack pushed himself off the wall. “When she turned over the bills, the day she dug them up.”
I glanced down at the microscope. Wait—what? That night at El Gaucho, I handed him the bills. Not the soil sample …although …there was soil on the bills. What a clever save. I wanted to look up, see Jack’s face. He was being truthful. Just like my dad dealing with my mom’s paranoia, always telling her the truth but letting her assumptions work for us. I held a deep-deep breath and scraped the scalpel over a bill taken from the bundle’s middle. I dusted that inner soil onto another glass slide, then turned the viewing platform on its axis, cranking the magnification to 200X.
Grant’s shadow fell over my right shoulder. “What do you see?”
My heart stopped. I twisted the focus knob and zoomed in on rounded grains of brown silt. Like beads. I also saw pale opaque dots of quartz, possibly the calcium, or even a calcium-bearing element, whatever had bubbled under the HCl solution. But that wasn’t what stopped my heart. Reaching back, I took tweezers in my rock kit.
“Are you going to tell me?” Grant asked.
“Soon as I know something.” I used the tweezers to divided the grains, pushing away silt like a knife getting green vegetables away from red meat. When the most important piece was centered in the viewfinder, I rotated the viewing plate. My heart was pounding. I spoke without looking up, without giving Grant an opening to shove his big face into the lens. “Jack, please hand me the brass sieves. They’re in my pack. Unbuckle the brass top.”
Using paper like a cone, I funneled this latest soil into the eight-inch canister, the grains dancing on the mesh filter. I rebuckled the top and handed the stack of connected sieves to Grant.
“Shake it.”
His left eye twitched. “Wha—”
“Shake this canister side-to-side until I tell you to stop.”
His dark eyes flashed with anger, but I was already turning away, picking up another twenty-dollar bill from the middle of the pack. Behind me, the geological percussion began, the sound of soil sluicing through the metal filters and screens. I scraped down the next bill and put that soil under the scope. More silt. And about a dozen grains that—geologically speaking—shouldn’t be there. I listened to the brass percussion, certain the sieve process was finished. But why ruin a good thing?
After thirty seconds, I turned and smiled. “Thanks. I’ll take it from here.”
I unbuckled each canister. The interior screens had divided by the grains by size, and the tiny shards I hoped for waited in the second-to-last cup. Sprinkling them on another Vaseline-smeared slide, I bent over the scope. Oh. Wow.
“Harmon?”
I adjusted the focus knobs. Then readjusted.
Grant panted at my side. “You better tell us soon, honey.”
I lifted my face, my tongue begging to reply, Call me Honey one more time and I’ll call you Fatty. But I only smiled. Because I’d just struck gold. “Hypersthene and feldspar enclosed in vesicular glass jackets.”
Jack laughed.
Grant glared at him. “Why is that funny?”
“Because …” Jack shook his head. “Never mind. Harmon, keep going.”
“The vesicular jackets are made of glass. The glass encloses other minerals. That indicates that before cooling, the minerals floated in a liquid silica magma.”
“Try that again,” Grant said.
I pushed away from the scope. “Take a look yourself.”
Grant bulldogged forward. I glanced over at Jack, and my chest ached. One part thrill of the hunt, one part despair. Swallowing the second part, I stared at Grant’s ruddy profile as he peered into the scope.
“At extremely high temperatures, silica will turn into liquid. But with an extreme drop in temperature, it quickly turns into glass. For instance, when a volcano explodes. The lava inside—liquid magma—spews into the air and, for lack of a better word, the silica freezes into glass.”
Grant, still bent over the scope, said nothing. I glanced at Jack. He mouthed the words Good job. My heart kicked me.
“Do you see those rectangular shapes?” I asked Grant. “They look sort of like throat lozenges.”
He twisted the focus knobs, back and forth, hard, then lifted his face. A frown pulled down his forehead, his cold eyes disappearing in folds of heated flesh. “Yeah. I saw that. What about it?”
“Did you see the dark fragments—they look like peppers inside the lozenges?”
“Yeah.” Grant backed away from the scope. “What’s it mean?”
“This is just my educated guess at this point, but I’m fairly certain this soil contains Mount St. Helen’s ash.”
I waited, letting the fact sink in.
It didn’t.
“Whoop-de-doo,” Grant said. “You obviously don’t know much about this area, especially for a geologist. St. Helen’s blew its top clear off. Ash went everywhere. My car was smothered.”
“Then you weren’t parked in Seattle.”
Hi
s fleshy face looked confused, like an overfed baby trying to use logic. “I was still in school at Gonzaga.”
“Spokane?” I walked to the white board on the wall behind my chair and picked up the black dry-erase pen, drawing a rectangle. “Let’s say this is Washington state.” I drew two curvy horizontal lines at the bottom. “And let’s say this is the Columbia River carving the boundary between Washington and Oregon.” About three inches above the river, I drew a triangle, then crossed out the top quarter. “St. Helen’s blows its top, May 18, 1980.” I moved the marker to the left, toward the Pacific Ocean. “The jet stream that day coming in from the ocean blew east.” From the ocean, I drew a wavy line to Mount St. Helens, then thicker lines as I continued across the state. “The jet stream picked up St. Helen’s volcanic ash and carried it east. Two hundred and fifty miles away, Spokane received a massive amount of ash. Meanwhile—” I lifted the pen, moving it south of the volcano. “Portland, close enough to see the volcano on a clear day, received a much smaller amount.” I moved my marker north of the triangle. “Same with Seattle. Some ash, but nothing like the quantity that fell on areas east of the volcano.” I smiled. “Like Spokane, where, as you said, your car was smothered.”
Grant didn’t even try to hide his disgust. “You’re saying this money was in Spokane and wound up on the Olympic peninsula? That sounds far-fetched.”
I replaced the top of the marker and walked back to the scope. “D.B. Cooper hijacked the plane in 1971. That’s almost nine years before St. Helens blew up. We need to figure out how that ash got on these bills—even deep inside the bundle.” I took out that slide and replaced it with the slide of Willapa riverbank soil. I turned the focus. “Also, there’s not even a trace of volcanic ash in the local soil. The ash on these bills tells me they were brought there.”
The silence was deafening. And pleasing.
Until Grant spoke.
“How can you be sure it’s St. Helens’ ash?”
Because as a kid, I was obsessed with volcanics. If I went to a shrink, they’d tell me it was a subconscious connection to my mother’s volcanic moods. Whatever. But when I was in elementary school, the world’s best dad fed my obsession, giving me books on Vesuvius and Mount St. Helen’s eruption. I memorized the process, the mechanics, the timeline. And I memorized those glass jackets. They made so much sense to me, because that’s how I survived my mom’s explosions. I kept a clear protective coating around my heart. Like glass.
“I recognize the mineralogy,” I told Grant. “And given the local soil, we can say these bills were located somewhere else prior to being buried.” I figured Grant wouldn’t even be rounding first base yet, so I added, “We also have the rubber band. Lack of decay means these bills were likely buried recently. That also indicates a prior location.”
Another silence. Which pleased me even more.
Not wanting to gloat, I picked up my pen and drew a sketch of the glass jackets in my notebook, adding flecks of feldspar and magnetite. As I drew, I was struck by something strange, how dealing with my volcanic mother had now brought me success on this battlefield. What a mystery it was, how the terrible things we wanted to wish away could end up benefiting us.
“Now what?” Grant asked.
“I’d like to get the exact chemical composition.”
“You just said it was St. Helens ash.”
“That’s the start. But the exact mineralogy is crucial. Especially the relative proportions—percentages of each mineral. There isn’t just ash here. And if we find the same relative mineral composition somewhere else, it’s like a fingerprint. Those proportions might also help me locate where the money’s been all this time. Like a trail of breadcrumbs.”
Grant shook his head. “This evidence doesn’t leave this building.”
Fine. I’d done my part.
Not wanting to argue, I started packing up my gear. This guy, the stubborn agent. Highly successful with stolen artifacts. Probably hogged all the glory, too. But I also felt a begrudging respect for him. Fighting crime on behalf of a government bureaucracy that wanted all paperwork in triplicate hadn’t corroded Grant’s passion for justice. Admirable. No wonder McLeod liked the guy. But right now, I’d given my all and my stomach was growling. I unplugged the scope and put it back in the box.
“Harmon?” Jack’s voice was softer than usual. “Could we get the equipment you need, and bring it in here?”
I wiped down the slides. “You’d need to find a scanning electron microscope hooked to a computer with the software programs that can calculate the relative mineralogy of the soil sample.” I looked up. “Either of you have that hanging around here?”
Grant turned to Jack. “What about our geologist?”
Our geologist. The guy would never see me as legit. I put the slides in their box.
“Harmon’s going to go talk to him.”
“When?” Grant looked directly at me.
I glanced over my shoulder, pretending to look for something else. “Soon.”
Jack said, “Today.”
“Good.” Grant headed for the door. “I’ll let him know you’re coming. Today.”
He left the door open. Jack and I both waited to hear the ding of the elevator on the other side of the bullpen. Even then, Jack leaned through the doorway, making sure Grant was really gone.
“Harmon—”
“Don’t start with me, Jack. That guy’s got serious issues. I’m not his punching bag.”
“Punching bag? How would you feel? The biggest case of your entire career starts to break three months before retirement. And the consultant hired by the Bureau doesn’t seem to share the same sense of urgency. You want me to believe you’d react any differently?”
“No.” I grabbed my pack and headed for the door, turning at the last moment. “And maybe that’s why I don’t work for the FBI anymore.”
13
Muttering under my breath like a patient at my mother’s asylum, I grabbed a burger from Jerry’s Juicy Burgers—extra fries, extra-extra mayo—and carried the food to my office. I ate quickly and combed through some information on pegmatites. Before I was ready to stop, it was time to pick up Madame at Eleanor’s house.
But when I pulled up to the proud Victorian in Tacoma, a white cargo van waited in the driveway. The sign on the side door was written in curly script:
Marvelous Martin’s Masquerade.
Beneath that, a question asked: Why be you when you can be someone else?
Walking toward the back door, my best guess was that someone finally came to pick up Eleanor’s many costumes and props, the remnants from her acting days that filled several rooms of the house.
I should’ve known better.
Eleanor opened the back door before I could even touch the knob. “How do I look?”
She wore go-go boots, black patent leather go-go boots. Her skirt was fire-engine red and hung above her matchstick legs, topped off with a similarly eye-blinding red jacket decorated with oversized silver buttons. And crowning her white hair was a ridiculous red cap with a black bowstring around the brim. I looked at the brass name plate pinned to the jacket, but couldn’t read it because it was facing the ceiling.
“Are you wearing falsies?” I asked.
She turned sideways, exhibiting her newly robust profile. “If Blanche had these babies, Stanley would’ve been an entirely different character.”
I nodded, mostly out of shock, and stepped inside.
Eleanor sashayed away, her boot heels clicking on the floor. When I closed my eyes, the red outfit appeared, burned on my retinas.
“Raleigh,” she called out, leaving the room. “You still haven’t told me what you think?”
“Yeah, where’s your fire engine?” I looked around the kitchen. No dog. I followed Eleanor into the living room, ready to call out for Madame, but Eleanor started bellowing.
“Marvin! Oh, Marvelous Marvin! I want you to meet someone.”
Maybe it was that burger from the diner, b
ad mayo or spoiled meat, because I seemed to be hallucinating. There, on the edge of the living room’s oriental carpet, Madame lay with her head between her paws. Her gaze locked on a small bald man who was dancing with a headless seamstress dummy. It wore a red outfit just like Eleanor, and the bald man gripped pins in his mouth, humming.
I whispered, “Madame.”
She trotted over. I picked her up. Quickly.
“Marvin!” Eleanor continued trumpeting, although we were all in the same room. “Fate has smiled upon us. Raleigh’s home early. Go size her up!”
“Uh, Eleanor? Halloween’s over.”
“And speaking of Halloween,” she said to Marvin as he plucked pins from his lips, “Raleigh refused my Princess Kosmopolis costume. Can you imagine? Who could turn down that gorgeous outfit?”
Marvin’s voice was somewhere between a squawk and a honk. “Nobody can wear it like you!”
She batted her eyelashes then pivoted toward me. I jumped back, shielding the dog from a direct hit from the new chest. “Marvin’s a genius with needle and thread.”
Right there, I got a bad feeling. I also didn’t like the way Marvin was looking at me.
“Oh my!” He squawk-honked. “Eleanor, she’s the exact size you gave me. I don’t think we need any alterations.”
“Alterations?” The bad feeling deepened. “Whatever you two are up to, count me out. I hate dressing up and I hate—”
Marvin swiveled the headless dummy. “But look, it’s marvelous!”
I almost dropped the dog. The outfit was identical to Eleanor’s, from shiny black boots to the ridiculous red cap. But the skirt was way, way, way too short.
Eleanor, doing some kind of dance, kicked up a booted leg. Or maybe she was having a stroke. “We’ll be a hit!”
Madame squirmed in my arms, probably because of my tense grip. “This seems like a lot of lead time for Halloween.”
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